Sumo Paint: A Very Fine, Free Online Image Editor

Sumo Paint is a free web-based image editor with some very impressive features. I’m not going to describe it as a rival or even a serious alternative to Photoshop, because it’s not. What it is however, is an excellent little graphics editor that is useful for web designers or developers who may not have or want to use Photoshop.

Sumo is now on version 1.1, uses the Flash 10 player and is improving with each iteration. The interface looks a lot like Photoshop. It has palettes lying along the right hand side, a floating toolbox and menus with some of the same functions and commands as PS. Sumo supports layers and layer effects, image adjustments such as brightness, color balance and levels. Sharpening, blurring as well as several other filters are here too so it is possible to do some nice photo editing as well as creating new graphics.

If you’ve used Photoshop before, then the Sumo toolbox holds many familiar faces. The Magic Wand, Lasso, Clone, Pencil, Paint Bucket, Gradient and Eraser tools are all here as well as many shape tools. A Curve tools works in somewhat similar fashion to the Pen tool, letting you create smooth curves and corners easily. The symmetry tool is interesting to play and could be very helpful for making patterns.

On the downside, it will open only JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs and you can only save your creations as JPEGs or PNGs. If you want to save any layered image you create, you will need to sign up for a free account. Having said that, if you’re creating web graphics, or doing some simple photo editing, then this is no major hardship. You can also share your work with the community and Sumo already has a lot of fans.

So if you’re caught on someone else’s computer with only Paint on board, or if you simply want to try out a good graphics editor for free, Sumo is well worth a visit. It beats the online Photoshop Express hands down. It is free, fast and requires no sign-up.

Have you used Sumo before? Did you like it? What other web-based graphics editors do you use?

However, the only thing I didn’t like about the community was that images could be manipulated by others, and some people don’t want that. You can save images to the computer it seems….but I’d have to see for myself if it can be done without an account. Not that I don’t doubt the author; I just want to try for myself when it comes to these things.

http://www.magain.com/ Matthew Magain

It seems the link to Sumo Paint got omitted. Post has been updated. Thanks to those who pointed it out!